On the Use of HAPS to Increase Secrecy Performance in Satellite Networks

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of radio frequency (RF) eavesdropping for a high altitude platform station (HAPS) aided satellite communication (SatCom) system. More precisely, we propose a new SatCom scheme where a HAPS node is used as an intermediate relay to transmit the satellite’s signal to the ground station (GS). In this network, free-space optical (FSO) communication is adopted between HAPS and satellite, whereas RF communication is used between HAPS and GS as the line-of-sight (LoS) communication cannot be established. To quantify the overall secrecy performance of the proposed scheme, closed-form secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the probability of positive secrecy capacity (PPSC) expressions are derived. Moreover, we investigate the effect of pointing error and shadowing severity parameters. Finally, design guidelines that can be useful in the design of practical SatCom networks are presented.